Sea GlassBillie Chernicoff

Sea Glass is the fifty-first in a series of texts and chapbooks published by Metambesen.

The reader is free to download and print it without charge or permission.

Poems copyright © 2018 by Billie Chernicoff

Cover photograph copyright © 2018 by Charlotte Mandell

Cover design by Larry Chernicoff

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For Charlotte and Robert

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Sea Glass

Billie Chernicoff

Metambesen

Annandale-on-Hudson 2018

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1.

No east, only mist.

The sea rose up,

a revelation,

my ear was its temple,

my skin was at home.

I had not slept

so I caught the news there.

I hurried to music.

There was a single gull

and there were many.

My friend listened with me.

Is that possible?

Like the arm of a cove.

The cotton sheet over us

swanned away, knots

untangled themselves,

just shadows,

and we too

were merely ourselves.

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2.

In a strange bed with no table

I an island say what I listen.

The sea all around me

rushes with secrets,

not only mine,

those of sadhus and widows

on the steps of the Ganges,

and those of the English,

their tyrannies,

civilities,

majestic certainties

and quiet prayer for bread,

their island no man is,

their drowned book.

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3.

Ink spread out

over the damp paper,

a lapis egg,

and I thought

something had ended

there, but with the next breath

I had taken the egg deep in

and couldn’t be sure

of anything,

though it felt safe in me

and could wait.

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4.

I’ll tell you a book

in another language

that has deeds and travelers

and silver for free.

There’s laughter at all hours

as if our gods lived

just across the street

and still loved us

and kept an eye on us

and never tired of our fumbling

and fondling and the moon

was a beaten gold cup,

gone by the time we get up to look.

How handsome he is, that gull.

I want us to touch each other.

Soon our almost immortal children

go to war and invent art.

Now I’ve lost track of the plot,

but it’s you, love, it’s you.

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5.

Every hour has its say.

If it’s not roses,

it’s Solomon’s Seal,

creamy cups dangling in the sky

or a stone I found on the beach

a granite almost heart

that holds paper on the table,

a pact with gravity,

lest we forget as we thump

crudely around that we,

too, agreed to be here,

tethered,

hoping to be educated.

Solomon’s Seal,

so called because the thick,

fleshy, medicinal root

bears leaf scars resembling

a king’s seal, a ring

inscribed by God herself.

This was in the time

of magician kings,

and the wisdom of love,

stars of David,

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heraldry, splendor.

Or so called for the dangling

liliaceous chalices

like Arabic drinking cups

marked on the bottom

with Solomon’s hex,

for anyone to see,

like that man,

pretending to be drunk,

inscribing the sigil in his mind.

He could be Solomon himself,

his ring stolen and thrown in the sea,

swallowed by a fish.

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6.

The islanders don’t lock their doors

so you can try their perfumes and violet ink,

remedies from cuttlefish and pure salt.

A fish is in charge of the church

and there are no sins and no headaches,

only baseball on the radio,

and composers beginning with B.

After awhile you begin to wonder

if all this could be true,

and Jesus doesn’t praise doubters,

though the other teacher does.

If only the ocean, if only the ocean were true.

You plunge in, uncertain apostle, to find

you’re inseparable, there is no wound

no wound at all. You are free to go.

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7.

J’oublie, I forget to dream

in my own language.

Oublions,

let’s forget together,

till we are here.

Till the lovely rough glass,

that fell from ships,

falls from our lips,

a turquoise like Botticelli’s,

the amber of Flemish varnish.

Gull, silica, salt on the sill,

ridge, coil, hidden whorl,

fig, ear, slipper, wing,

jingle, cockle, whelk, speckle,

shallow, swallow, ethereal null.

Now forget, now remember

living words and living water,

strange tongues, gone gods

come again, then we’re home.

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8.

On this island no one’s married.

A gold ring is the outward

visible sign

of endless proposals

like green, or the wind,

warm skin and rose hip tea,

a good, damp book,

the pale curtain you lift

to see the moon,

even a dog barking,

and a husband or lover

who comes to bed

and dreams he’s lost

in a perilous city,

while you dream of water,

never the same.

Or are we all married?

Here to husband

and wife each other,

to say good morning

bravely again,

and the vessel

of this promising

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ordeal of becoming

is vast, immeasurable,

so the word vessel

is meaningless,

like a tall sailing ship

on the horizon we can’t explain.

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9.

Who even knows what now is?

Something shy, swollen,

worshipful, scared,

hopeful, inventive,

tensing and loosening

its limbs. Streams

and unfurls the sea’s

own being. A feeling,

breathing luminescence

that hovers, sways,

slips off its clothes.

All desire, needs nothing,

all mind with a secret bone,

insinuates, occults, divulges itself

with a spurt of ink like a cuttlefish.

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10.

Rebellious swimmer,

the sepia subject,

much copper in the blood,

Aphroditic, oceanic,

motherless,

with archetypal eyes,

a ruse? Is moved

by feeling. Itself.

Whoever.

Unable to hide

her tears, projects

as a mask

a powerful anima

with bedroom eyes.

An incomparable enemy,

sly, as a lover, a virtuoso,

with excitable, camera eyes.

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11.

Close your ears.

To hear again

is to be in love

with that strange girl

under the wave,

who lulls you

till you want to be her.

Come inside,

before she’s all you know

and you live forever

in a house with no floor.

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12. Catalogue of the Stones

Smooth, rugosa, broken hearted,

volcanic, lunatic, translucent.

Chaste, adulterous,

romantic italics,

arias, heresies,

obvious forgeries.

Passwords,

guesswork,

rumors,

silences,

the null that breathes

and closes your eyes,

good anglo saxon words

that fit in the hollow of your hand.

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13.

Naiein, to swim

or suckle

a sort of rapport

with oneself

herself,

a borne up

affinity.

Yes, absolute.

Once swim

meant water,

lucid anima

of the whole world.

But how to understand

its olden root,

to hunt?

Is it that we listen for her?

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14.

The fisher king

can only fish,

which is nothing

but waiting.

He waits in the mist

where no one

ever comes along

except a fish, lured

by the man’s confessions,

the provocative glisten

of his doubts.

“The infidel, I hear,

has many words for love,

whereas I have but one,”

the man says to the fish,

or “I have learned

all this timeless time

only to be here,”

or “Everything happens

in the body.”

“Teach me to pray,”

a prentice to the sea.

“Not only whom

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does the grail serve,

but who is the grail,”

he says at last,

and thus each consents

in his own way to be healed.

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15.

If nothing else, mist.

Damp paper,

sticky table, the wet

from the chair seeping up.

You can hear it

in the leaves.

These are the close,

obvious things

I count on,

the things at hand,

weather,

fat drops of water

sliding over the rose hips,

and birds, the articulate

sparrows and cardinals,

friends of friends,

rude gulls and grackles,

those lovers I love

as a sort of practice,

and then really do.

They bring the small,

important news,

all I can know of here

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or anywhere,

through this sea fog

of real substance

so you can see the air,

its tides of bright shards,

veils that unveil.

The blessed visible,

the given I take

for something to know,

something to say.

Sea glass. Fragments

of what may once have been

one great rose window

in some mythic, beloved Europe

whose roughed up words

we pick up on the beach

and use again.

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16.

Mist, and green tea,

its smoky

slightly bitter

familiarity,

the givens,

what is at hand.

What alights

and goes,

the null

that is grace.

In a little while

mist will be gone,

tea will be gone,

the mourning dove

with his rose throat,

and pretty wings,

his cry or coo,

which is not mourning,

but wooing, will be gone.

In such nothings

we begin,

in the silences.

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17.

Likewise the heart

is not a pump.

It is moved to answer.

Persuaded,

breathed,

sucked into form,

the heart acquiesces

to blood’s sovereign motive,

the vortices of galaxies,

tornadoes,

the spiraling whelk,

whorl of the ram’s horn,

the involute rose,

the desire of desire

to rise and go round,

its devotion,

obsession,

swoon to be known,

the gothic arch,

the embrace,

helix of the I/thou

that pulses and twists

through the child in the womb,

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creating a heartbeat,

then a heart.

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18.

That explains the intelligence

of the heaven of the moon

that heralds the herald

of those who call out.

It explains the mutual

lunar tug, how ardor acts,

its comings and goings,

the tidal swirl

(beauty, love, loss)

that makes that odd, tilted

heptahedron, that grail in our chest,

and all the heart shaped stones on the beach.

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19.

My errors are many,

lies numberless.

What I know of astronomy

is only anatomy.

I confess that ship

is just a tree

rooted in the mind,

or another zodiac

octaves above,

flames you can read

through a rising wave

if you’re any sailor,

though you may founder

on a single letter.

The tongue fishes

for lost words, mother,

a naiad,

father, the light,

whose light eyed daughter

you might even marry,

to find yourself lost

in her atlas or odyssey,

labors and miracles,

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oars and wings,

a book of longing.

Touched everywhere,

are you touched?

The utterly known

can only be unknown.

Weaving unweaving

her misterie,

deceiving the long night,

a gull, a ruse,

the eye of the island,

a cunning shuttle,

a sea of hearsay,

and all the voices her one.

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Notes Penelope, daughter of a Naiad and wife of Odysseus, is a hidden figure in Sea Glass. Naiad comes to us from the word for swim, or flow, its Indoeuropean root (s)nāu is also the root of words for suckle, like nurse and nurture. Naiads are water nymphs, and while lighthearted by temperament, they can also be jealous and a bit overexcited, sometimes drowning the men they love.

The name Penelope may have originated from the word for ‘woof’ or ‘shuttle’ or, alternatively, from the name of a water bird. A gull is a water bird, and a ruse.

Rumors are many. Duris of Samos and the Vergilian commentator Servius report that Penelope slept with all 108 suitors in Odysseus' absence, and consequently

gave birth to Pan (all).

“The shroud Penelope weaves is a coded language representing the Odyssey’s major themes: “la mémoire et l’ oubli, le mariage et la mort, la ruse.”* One might imagine that Penelope is conning both suitors and readers, and that the shroud she weaves and unweaves alone in her room, deceiving the long night, is the Odyssey itself, and Penelope its author -- text as textile, yarn for yarn, craft as craft. Shroud, a thing that envelops or obscures, "a shroud of mist," "a shroud of secrecy." cf. Old Norse skruð "shrouds of a ship, tackle, gear; (mid-15c.) strong rope supporting the mast of a ship. One without rigging was said to be naked. Mystery, from Old French mistere, secret, hidden meaning, from Latin mysterium, secret rite, secret worship; a secret thing, from Greek mysterion, secret rite or doctrine, from mystes, one who has been initiated, from myein, to close, to shut, perhaps the lips, in secrecy.

Mystery, handicraft, trade, art (archaic), late 14c., from Medieval Latin misterium, alteration of Latin ministerium, service, occupation, office, ministry, influenced in form by Medieval Latin mysterium and in sense by maistrie, mastery.

*Christos Tsagalis, The Oral Palimpsest” Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University.